


Sound and Color

by TessellateOcean



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: AU, Forever and ever, M/M, Tyrelliot forever, tyrelliot
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-16
Updated: 2016-06-16
Packaged: 2018-07-15 12:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7222753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TessellateOcean/pseuds/TessellateOcean
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tyrell is free of Joanna and ready to live his best bisexual life in the gayborhood of Chelsea, NYC. But will he fall for some twink on Grindr, or maybe his strange, antisocial neighbor Elliot instead? </p><p>(hint: ...the latter. Always the latter.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Tyrell drew back the curtain to watch as the last white moving van drove away. That was it. He was all alone at last. He exhaled contentedly. Sure, there were cardboard boxes piled everywhere that would need to be unpacked; all the walls were white and blank, everything clean and as-yet unlived-in. But all that could wait. He flopped down on the futon someone had set down squarely in the middle of the room. Here it was. His new apartment. His new life.

Geographically-speaking, he hadn’t exactly gone very far. The walk-up that up until very recently he had shared with Joanna was only three blocks from this fourth-floor studio, overlooking the same street. He had been living in Chelsea for five years. But had he ever really lived there? He had lived the heteronormative dream: wife, child on the way, corporate ladder ambitions. The fact that his ostensibly-heterosexual bubble was surrounded by New York’s most lively gayborhood was one that he—a closeted bisexual—had tried his best to ignore.

He had always dreaded going out on little walks with Joanna to the store or the park, having to police himself with all his might. It was a constant stream of attractive men, including many couples affectionately holding hands or with their hands in each other’s back jean pockets or nuzzling around the neck, and it was all he could do to pretend not to see them.

Joanna was too damn perceptive. Sometimes she would goad him a little, slyly: “Mhmm, see how that one likes you,” she would say, noting how a man had given him the once-over. “Ooh, he thinks you’re quite fit,” she would chuckle, nudging him. “What’s the matter? Not your type?” Tyrell, who had kept his head down the whole time, would get angrily defensive—“No, that’s disgusting!”—which would only make Joanna laugh snidely and dig in more. “Really, Tyrell, I don’t understand your tastes. That boy was simply _oh là là_!”

Whether Joanna guessed at Tyrell’s inclinations or not was something he could never be sure about (nor ask her, for obvious reasons). She enjoyed her little comments because she knew they made him uncomfortable—he only hoped she thought his discomfort was that of a straight man feeling objectified, rather than his own fear that she was coming too close to the truth. It always took all his willpower not to look back and see what the guy had looked like. Had he really been checking him out? Was he really that attractive? He was dying to know. But instead he had to act completely disinterested, fully aware Joanna was always scrutinizing him intensely, annoyed and resentful of her.

But then were the times when he went out for walks by himself. Then he would let himself walk with his head up, glance this way and that at all the beautiful queer men the neighborhood had to offer. He didn’t have to worry abut Joanna noticing, allowing himself to sometimes do a double-take, to turn his head around to watch a nice ass or check out a guy’s calves, but he forced himself to stay subtle and discreet. He knew gay men were, in their own way, extremely perceptive. Sometimes he would accidentally make eye contact with them and they would meet his gaze with interest, curiosity, a kind of questioning expectation in their eyes. He could feel them trying to read something about him, and it made him uncomfortable. He wasn’t in denial about his own proclivities, but he was ashamed of the effeminacy they seemed to exude with pride, hated how they seemed to disregard him as just another hetero, or worse, gave off a feeling of derision towards him, labeling him closeted and looking for something on the DL.

He was in fact closeted—in the corporate world, he was whomever he had to be (and that was unequivocally straight); and while Joanna knew he sometimes had to sleep with men in the course of his machinations, he had never hinted to her that he sometimes enjoyed it, that simply he had always felt attracted to men just as he was attracted to women. It was something that had never given him pause, that at times was even quite enjoyable, so long as he could present as straight and fill that social role. But he had never cheated on Joanna with a man. He wasn’t one of those who went skulking around the parks in the evenings, still in their suits from work, with downcast, shifty eyes, looking for a quick fix. Those types disgusted him, and he hated how he could tell the gay boys tended to lump him in with them, in the looks of knowing condescension they gave him.

He wasn’t opposed to the theory of cheating, but as a practical matter it would have been impossible. He had never been able to keep anything from Joanna; she knew things about himself that he would never be able to guess at. She probably had known he was bisexual from the first time they met; she just pretended not to because it kept things simpler for her.

But now he would be walking those same neighborhoods single and ready to mingle. He was actually looking, specifically for some guy action. Maybe in the coming hot summer months he would wear a tight tanktop, buy some shorts that really showed off his ass… It was suddenly so real it was actually intimidating. Tyrell did not like feeling intimidated by anything, ever. But he couldn’t deny it was one thing to look at men when he was married, “monogamous” (at least within agreed-upon confines), when they considered him straight or at the least totally unavailable. It was another thing to actually be available and interested. He couldn’t remain detached and superior and remote; there was even the possibility of rejection. Ugh. The thought of it made Tyrell squirm uncomfortably. _Vulnerability_. His most hated word in any language. No, no way was he going to look for hook ups in the street like some desperate baby gay, fuck that—he was going to Grindr.


	2. Chapter 2

Tyrell stretched on the futon and glanced at his watch. He had apparently been scrolling the never-ending collage of bare torso pics for the last two hours. It had made him feel better about jumping into the gay world. There were an endless number of ripped, hot guys out there, all of whom seemed to be on Grindr, but having taken in the sight of hundreds of perfect biceps and pecs and abs, he realized none of them actually made him feel inferior. He was hot. He would dominate any and all of them. As in any of his pursuits, he simply had to remember the most important thing: always keep the upper hand, always make it clear who holds all the cards.

Within ten minutes of signing up to the app, he’d gotten five very thirsty messages. The idea of it made him laugh with scorn. He hadn’t even put up a picture of himself, just a white box where required; he hadn’t written a single word on his profile. How could people be so desperate that they would message a blank profile? Maybe the messages were from bots. No, he pushed the thought away. He preferred to believe the alternative: all other people were, at their core, simply pathetic.

He wanted to gloat to someone about how wanted and desired he already was. He had started texting Joanna before he decided against it and deleted the text draft. That would have made things too easy for her; he could already imagine her response: “Oh Tyrell, congratulations on finding some hungry little cocksucker!” Really, what had he been thinking.

Joanna had been on the whole quite dispassionate about their divorce (cold and dead inside as she was, he thought to himself), but she had a nasty vindictive streak, as he knew well. Their son had been the final nail in the coffin. She was done with him, and he was done with her. Joanna granted him certain visitation rights—she wanted her child to have a father in his life, she had said—but would have the boy most of the time. Tyrell loved his son, but in some ways he was glad. He had always expected, even if they had stayed together, that Joanna would take care of the day-to-day affairs of child-rearing: the diapers, the feedings, the charts and appointments. He would enjoy seeing his child, taking him for father-son activities when he was older; but right now, he was far too focused on his own sudden, unanticipated freedom. It was something that was hard to imagine in its absence, but all-consuming now that he had it.

Tyrell decided to allot himself forty more minutes of self-esteem-boosting eyecandy before he made himself get up off the futon and start unpacking things. He scrolled. And scrolled. And scrolled. Which did he prefer, he thought to himself idly, the well-built guys who really put in their time at the gym, or the lithe little twinks? He dwelled on one of the latter, sandy-haired with golden skin, staring out a window in his picture, face lit up by sunlight…

_“WATCH OUT! YOU MIGHT GET WHAT YOU’RE AFTER! COOL BABY! STRANGE BUT NOT A STRANGER! I’M—AN—ORD—I—NAR—Y—GUY—BURNING DOWN THE HOUSE!”_

What the fuck? _What the fuck!_ Tyrell stood up irritably. He had suddenly discovered which of the many cardboard boxes had his dishes in it; he could hear the poorly-packed ones tinkling a little as they vibrated from the intensely loud stereo base. What kind of a pristine, quaint little gayborhood was this, that his next-door neighbor was obnoxiously blasting Talking Heads like a college-dorm punk?

Tyrell crossly smoothed his clothes and his hair and then grabbed his keys. Well, this was one way to meet the neighbors. He couldn’t care less about burning bridges so early on—anyone who thought everyone should have to listen to their stupid music was already nothing to him.

He knocked on apartment 4B’s door loudly. As he expected, there was no answer—he could barely hear his own knocks over the din. He kept knocking, using the flat back of his fist. It was pointless. He grabbed the handle and pushed the door open.

He plugged his ears. How could the apartment tenant stand it? The music was three times louder here, at its source, than it’d been in his living room. Even with his ears plugged it was deafening.

He looked with interest at his same apartment layout mirrored, in reverse. In contrast to the airy, white bareness of his undecorated place, this apartment felt heavy and dark and cluttered. The shades were pulled over the window; there were some black clothes on the floor; the room seemed focused around a large, double-monitor computer on a desk. Tyrell looked around. Strangely, he couldn’t seem to see where the music was coming from. There were none of the giant tower speakers he was expecting, the only kind of thing that could produce that much sound.

Tyrell located the apartment’s occupant: a man lying on the leather couch, in dark jeans and a black sweatshirt with the hood up, curled away from him in a position that looked like he was sleeping. _He was napping?_ That made things even more ludicrous. It also made Tyrell’s position trickier. How to wake him up and get him to turn his music off without seeming like a psycho breaking-and-enterer standing over him? Well, it couldn’t be helped…

Tyrell walked over and lowered one hand, from where he’d had it plugging his ear, to nudge the sleeper. He placed it on the man’s shoulder, but he hadn’t gotten any further before the man on the couch shot to his feet as if he had been electrocuted. He stood, panting, a few feet away, eyes bulging wildly out of his face, staring at Tyrell in shock.

Tyrell put his hands up quickly in a sign of peace. “It’s okay!” he mouthed, unable to make any sound over the roar of the music.

_"MY HOUSE! IS OUT OF THE ORDINARY! THAT'S RIGHT! DON'T WANNA HURT NOBODY! SOME-THINGS-SURE-CAN-SWEEP-ME-OFF-MY-FEET!"_

The other scrutinized him a bit, taking in, no doubt, Tyrell thought, his expensive clothes and haircut, which hardly marked him as a robber; and seemed to relax slightly, judging him not a threat; but his expression stayed wary. He walked over to a small speaker the size of his hand, that Tyrell had not noticed, on a bookshelf, and turned it off. Suddenly the music was gone. Tyrell’s ears were ringing. It was so sudden. And how could a tiny speaker have produced so much _sound_? Tyrell was a techie, but he hadn’t seen any speaker like that on the market…

“Who are you.” The voice was gravelly and dark. It was a command rather than a question.

“I’m Tyrell Wellick, I just moved into 4A. I came to complain about the noise.”

“What noise?” the man said distantly.

Tyrell couldn’t prevent an eye-roll. The obliviousness was astonishing.

He allowed himself to really look at his interlocutor. It was hard to look at any part of him but his giant eyes which filled his face, intense, penetrating, and somewhat savage. His features were well-chiseled, but Tyrell wasn’t sure if he was handsome. His look was, more than anything else, simply unique. He had a grunginess to him, slightly ragged and street-worn. Yet again Tyrell had to wonder: what kind of Chelsea resident was this?

“Your music was so loud it was rattling the dishes in my apartment,” Tyrell said. “I would have preferred to knock on your door rather than barging in, but I’m afraid the knocks couldn’t be heard, either.”

“Oh.” The man shrugged.

“Were you trying to _sleep_ with that din?” Tyrell couldn’t resist asking.

“Uh, yeah. That’s how I sleep.” He shrugged again.

“What do you mean that’s how you sleep?” Tyrell said incredulously.

“Uh, it helps me block things out.” It wasn’t a satisfactory explanation, and Tyrell wanted to press him on it, but it was clear he wasn’t going to say more.

“Well, can you use headphones in the future?” Tyrell asked.

The other shrugged and looked down. He seemed out of it. It didn’t seem like he was even listening.

“You do this every time you nap or go to bed?” Tyrell asked. “I’m honestly the first one to complain about it?”

“Yeah. Well, the speakers are new. I just hooked them up today.”

“What kind of speakers are they? I’ve never seen such small speakers with such power,” Tyrell couldn’t resist asking, his professional interest piqued.

“It’s not the speakers, it’s the amps. I designed them and rigged them up.” The man was clearly not a talker. Every word seemed to cost him, and he was clearly uncomfortable. He couldn’t make eye contact.

“I would love to know more—“ Tyrell interjected, honestly curious.

“Uh, can you just get out.”

Tyrell looked up, surprised at his bluntness.

“Ah….” He made for the door, feeling wrongfooted by the man’s behavior. He had just gotten to the doorway when he remembered he’d missed something important. “Wait—What’s your name?”

The other man looked frustrated that he had asked yet another question. “Elliot,” he got out reluctantly, and then closed the door in his face.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just for the record, Tyrell may call Elliot's music stupid, but I love Talking Heads! :D


End file.
